Meet the Murdochs

Their father is media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the family business a global giant worth billions of dollars. So what do the sons and daughters of one of the world's most powerful and controversial men really think about him? They rarely speak to the press, but here, on Dad's orders, they reveal all to Michael Wolff

Meet the Murdochs

Their father is media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the family business a global giant worth billions of dollars. So what do the sons and daughters of one of the world's most powerful and controversial men really think about him? They rarely speak to the press, but here, on Dad's orders, they reveal all to Michael Wolff

Friday 28 November 2008 19.01 EST
First published on Friday 28 November 2008 19.01 EST

Having been in journalism in New York for more than 30 years, I inevitably became an anti-Murdochian. During the dotcom era, I had a public spat with Rupert's son, James, who was at the time running his father's none-too-successful internet businesses. I ridiculed his messianic pronouncements and he called me "an obnoxious dickhead". Or, as he tells it, "a jerk".

When I became the media columnist at New York magazine in 1998, my first piece was about Rupert Murdoch's imminent divorce from Anna, his wife of 32 years and mother of Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, all of whom have held senior positions at Murdoch's News Corporation and have at some time been viewed as Rupert's heirs-in-waiting. I found it a delightful possibility that marital acrimony might fracture the empire (I was wrong).

During the 2004 presidential campaign, meanwhile, I found myself, as the result of some idle cocktail party chatter, in a room of determined leftwing types considering how to counter yet another part of News Corp. We would attack the pro-Bush Fox News with a campaign to demonise Murdoch, who was not only the very personification of Big Media but a thrice-married foreigner with an Australian accent so thick that no one in America's foreigner-hating heartland would ever mistake him for anything else. You couldn't have a better villain.

On the other hand, I was curious about someone who so obviously did what he enjoyed doing. As much as you might detest him, Rupert Murdoch had been, over so many years, an original and unstoppable force.

I ran into Murdoch himself in 2002 at a technology conference in California. He'd seemed hapless, holding on to a stuffed animal he'd been given in a swag bag and planned to give to his new daughter - but also, it seemed, holding on for dear life. In wise-guy fashion, a few of us - fellow conference attendees - asked if he wanted to go for a drink. He accepted our invitation with alacrity and, finding the bartender awol, commandeered the bar himself. Here was an appealing man, puckish, easy-going, unpretentious, in a Wal-Mart flannel shirt. He seemed like someone's grandfather - indeed, he bore a strange resemblance to my own. We ended up having dinner and chatting for several hours.

Six years later, I found myself interviewing Murdoch's four grown-up children for a book about "the man who owns the news". Murdoch himself had fixed it for them to talk to me. I assume this is part of his branding and legacy strategy, but there was no insistence on copy approval, or restrictions on what I might ask.

The timing could hardly have been better: Murdoch is by nature a cheap patriarch, but in 2007 he was forced to give the children of his first two marriages $150m each in stocks and shares as part of a deal that would open up the family trust to Grace and Chloe, his much younger kids by Wendi Deng. Now only the older kids' desire to please the old man could tie them to his business empire - just as it entered one of its most challenging periods, with the controversial takeover of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Prue

Prudence MacLeod, Rupert's oldest child, whose mother Patricia was married to Rupert between 1956 and 1966, has a sprawling, comfortable house overlooking Sydney Harbour in Vaucluse, one of Australia's most expensive neighbourhoods. It is filled with teenage children and their friends, and on the day I visit, Prue's husband, Alasdair, a Scotsman via Eton who is one of the senior-most guys at News Limited, News Corp's Australian arm, is sick in bed.

"Dad said, 'Say whatever you like,'" Prue says. Her openness comes as a surprise given that Rupert likes to portray her as nearly reclusive. As with Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, however, the message she wants to get across seems aimed not at the public but at her father.

Prue's message to 77-year-old Rupert is that, as the odd duck out, the housewife who chose to make her life outside the family business, she possesses a unique and perhaps powerful perspective. She is a truth teller, and an entirely good-natured one. Indeed, while her siblings display a certain forced and watchful attention, she is easy, unconcerned, eager to throw caution to the wind. That goes for the small things as well as the big. She reports telling her father, " 'Dad, I understand about dyeing the hair and the age thing. Just go somewhere proper. What you need is very light highlights.' But he insists on doing it over the sink because he doesn't want anybody to know. Well, hello! Look in the mirror. Look at the pictures in the paper." She further reports his response: "Well" - sputter, sputter - "you need a facelift."

Today, Prue wants to tell her father that she's owed something more for being excluded from the family's ring of accomplishment. There's no bitterness. In fact, it's sort of that she's owed something for not being bitter. And what she's owed has nothing much to do with anything material, but rather some further relationship with her father, some deeper level of rapport and understanding. She's her father's daughter, and hence different from Anna's children. "I had a stepmother," she says, "and they had a mother."

While Elisabeth, 40, Lachlan, 37, and James, 35, have become more and more self-conscious about being Murdochs, and increasingly see themselves as living inside a bubble, 50-year-old Prue has cultivated her outsiderness. As the Murdochs prepare to spend Christmas 2008 together, Prue is adamant that she won't be buying a yacht to join the family flotilla wherever it docks. No, she plans to rent one. She reached this decision after taking her son James on vacation with her family as they sailed around the Aeolian Islands. "They have massive boats, all of them," she says. "I never feel sophisticated enough to be on this big boat. They are all taller than me, that's the worst thing, so they all look chicer wherever they are, but especially on a boat, where everyone is in shorts or a swimsuit and I'm the short, fat one."

Her father's divorce from Anna in 1999 and subsequent marriage to Wendi Deng have, however, given her a kind of levelling confidence when it comes to her siblings: nobody understands better than Prue. "Elisabeth and I discussed it at one point in the very beginning, when everyone was hurt. It was interesting because I was just sitting there thinking, 'Well, hello, I've done this.' "

The bond with her siblings is real and obviously fierce. When Liz married the PR man Matthew Freud - of whom everybody was deeply wary at the time - Prue took it on herself to deliver the family ultimatum: "If you hurt her, I'll kill you." (Freud pointed out that James had just told him the same thing.)

But there's business, too. Prue's most direct point of competition is with Lachlan on the other side of Sydney. This is partly territorial: if Lachlan comes back into the business he left in 2005 (and it is hard to believe he won't), and if he takes the job most obviously suited to him - running News Corporation's Australian operations - that will mean he's blocked her husband from getting to the top.

But it is also temperamental: Prue is anonymous - "I've always been low-key and not many people know about me, and I like that, I just love that" - and Lachlan, to Prue, is the "king of Sydney". Lachlan lives in a $7m home with meticulous design detail overlooking Bronte Beach, the most fashionable address in this most fashionable of cities, and Prue lives, in Lachlan's dismissive description, with the uptight people overlooking the harbour.

Lachlan

Lachlan's turf, in addition to Bronte, is Surry Hills, where News Ltd has its HQ and where he has opened offices for the mostly as-yet-to-be-determined activities of his new company. In a converted warehouse, they resemble all self-consciously uncorporate offices in recently gentrified suburbs around the world.

Once famously handsome and fit - the striking good looks of both Murdoch sons help account for the gay rumours attached to both of these complacently married men - Lachlan is now a contented 30lb overweight. Indeed, he has the same boyish chubbiness that his father had in his late 30s. (Rupert, Prue says, desperately tried to lose weight when they lived in London by trying all manner of faddish diets, grapefruit diet included.) People mostly comment on the differences between father and son, but the similarities are as pronounced. They both, in one sense, have an odd lack of presence. They're both standoffish or even shy - making eye contact isn't their first move - and unexpectedly inarticulate. They both need someone to finish their sentences. So much for Murdoch's description to me of Prue as the inarticulate one.

In our interview, Lachlan is skittish and put-upon. He is talking only on his father's request; he would rather not be. Except that he, like Prue, seems clearly to regard this as a dialogue with his old man. The point he wants to make is about being infantilised. He makes it without obvious recrimination but with a sense of great burden, weariness almost. Lachlan, whose career has, in a sense, yet to start, has already experienced a great rollercoaster ride in his professional life. He has been tutored, elevated, anointed, then thwarted by his father's courtiers - and finally turned his back on it all.

It's important to understand how much the Murdochs' business is suffused with emotion, and how deeply involved the children have been with the affairs of the father. When News Corp almost went under in 1991, Lachlan remembers, "I think really, that, um, you know, shook him more than I've ever seen. He was, I remember, like, almost like putting him to bed. " Also: "It wasn't like Dad goes to work and works in the media and comes home, and you know, he's just Dad. Every breakfast was about media. My dad was, you know, we went through the newspapers every breakfast, through things - when we got home, Dad would come home usually with, um, businesspeople... even on weekends, right."

Now, in its way, all this living over the store added up to a stellar upbringing. From an early age, each of the professional Murdoch kids was good at what he or she did, far advanced beyond their age. Rupert, focused by his then-wife Anna, raised a coven of media managers. But while he empowered, he then didn't want to cede power. He trained, but didn't let go. It didn't even cross his mind to let any of the kids get an outside job, say.

In Lachlan's case, the father tried to recreate his own history. Lachlan at 22 (Rupert's age when he took over the Adelaide News) was sent like a viceroy from his home in the US to Australia - not so much the boy publisher as the boy governor-general. And he was received, in the land Murdoch had departed a quarter-century before, like a piece of the cloth. Everybody at News Ltd took pride in his least accomplishments. From 1997 to 2001, he ran the Australian business with distinction. And he became the prince of Australia - learned, in fact, how to be an Aussie - and married a girl who is just like (or at least looks just like) the girl who married dear old Dad. He learned the newspaper business and pretty much did everything he was supposed to do that Dad did, and then he was brought back from the provinces to take his rightful place at HQ.

What must the old man have been thinking? He must have been thinking in novelistic rather than business or managerial terms. It was some fine fantasy: the beloved son at his side. The beloved son taking over his beloved New York Post and, most of all, patiently, admiringly, loyally, lovingly watching the father as the years ran out, in this way being passed all the secrets of the Murdoch line.

There is no misunderstanding this storyline among his father's retainers. As a name throughout News Corp, Lachlan is almost as redolent as Rupert. Still, if there is within the company an absolute belief in a forthcoming succession and in the Murdochs as royalty, a people apart, there is, too, an obvious and constant comparison between once and future. If in Australia Lachlan was regarded as a clever, sophisticated guy - a tastemaker - and a good manager who built a strong rapport in newsrooms and with his executives, in the US the perception is that he was a weak, even pitiable, version of his dad. He was too sensitive; he was petulant; he lacked charm; he was not sharp. Formally, his title at News Ltd was chief executive. Both in name and in practice, he ran News Ltd's entire operations, overseeing all its newspapers and its pay television joint venture. In New York, his official title was deputy chief operating officer, which was meant to give him control of News Corp's US publications - the Post - and make him Peter Chernin's deputy at Fox.

The father in small but constant ways humiliated the son, which made him a joke to everybody else. In every meeting the father was the impatient, domineering, fussing presence. He couldn't stop calling attention to himself and away from the son. At the same time, the son, stamping his foot, was trying to call attention to himself. He started marketing campaigns for the Post; tried to bring a little class to a notoriously unclassy operation by throwing functions and parties in the tabloid's name. Over on the west coast, he hung out with movie stars and insisted his dad make smarter and hipper movies (Fight Club, which Rupert detested, was a Lachlan-supported project).

"Family businesses are great businesses," Lachlan says, "but they're, they're also fraught with difficulties, so, um, so the, uh... I think because you go back to that fundamental character trait that has served Dad so well, which is forward thinking and always driving forward, I think he, um, misunderstood - doesn't understand or appreciate sometimes, or he does, but doesn't think about how complicated they are, um - I'm not really answering the question, but, uh, don't you know my dad's never going to die?"

The curious thing, the unexpected thing, was that the son upped and resigned, just as his sister had a few years before. What's more, Lachlan, like Elisabeth, gave up his position without having any money. And yet here, in the old man's defence, is the other elemental point: if he tried to hold them and dominate them, he also apparently raised them to be able to say, "Fuck you."

The exit couldn't have been more painful for both father and son. Not only was Rupert embarrassed, but it showed his relative corporate vulnerability - News Corp's president, Peter Chernin, and the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, made life difficult for Lachlan and openly took credit for pushing him out.

But never mind. The Murdochs are sentimental only up to a point. Before his chair was cold, Lachlan was eclipsed in his father's estimation by his brother James, who had been hounding his back since childhood. In the blink of an eye, Lachlan went from the chosen one to the fallen one.

And then there was the issue of money. Lachlan's payout from News Corp was certainly generous. He didn't want for relocation expenses to Australia and a gilded exile lifestyle. But he didn't have enough money to make himself into something other than Murdoch's son. It has become one of his own parenting mantras: when his kids turn 18, he's giving them control of their dough.

It is for him, then, a significant development that the trust issue with Grace and Chloe was settled with $150m payouts. Because even as Rupert is considering ways to bring him back into the fold, Lachlan is finally in a position to make other plans. And he's not telling his father - or at least he's sharing as little as possible, and driving his father crazy in the process.

In early 2008, he tries to start his own Australian media empire with Jamie Packer, the son of Rupert's old rival, Kerry. Not only is Lachlan setting himself up as a potential competitor to the family business, but both Rupert and James think he is striking a terrible deal. He won't listen to them.

In the end, the transaction falls through. But it is hard for Murdoch to fathom why his son, who has Australia's most powerful media enterprise at his disposal, would even want a lesser one of his own. "I don't understand it, his brother doesn't understand it," the Old Man tells me. "Lachlan, from the age of four, was a stubborn bastard. He always was."

Elisabeth

Lachlan and Elisabeth form a special Murdoch club, the resignees - and Lachlan's exit from News Corp in 2005 and the surrounding press were managed by Elisabeth's husband, Matthew Freud. Like Lachlan, Elisabeth has a fierce defensiveness when it comes to her mother, Anna: she didn't louse up the marriage, their father did. And, like Lachlan, Elisabeth has set up on her own. She's hot media stuff. Both Lachlan and Elisabeth, in Australia and London, have become personalities (something their father never was).

Indeed, this is the context in which Elisabeth falls in love with Freud: he's her image consultant. This in itself is something of a rebellion against her father. It's a kind of insiderness that their father finds gauche. With their famous friends and their reputation as the British media's golden couple, his daughter and son-in-law are the kind of people his tabloids would naturally ridicule.

Elisabeth is, arguably, Rupert's most successful child - and his angriest. When I meet her in London at the inauspicious offices of her company, Shine, which is now one of the largest independent television producers in the world, she is as wary as Lachlan about speaking to me, and as concise in her message to her father: he's created vast emotional turmoil and ought to thank his lucky stars he's also produced children strong enough to survive it.

"It hasn't been an easy couple of years," says Elisabeth, who was managing director of BSkyB, News Corp's British satellite TV arm, from 1996 to 2001. "He still falls into stupid old habits. I mean, he's impossible to figure. He's weirdly awkward about things, but his heart is in the right place. He's very old-fashioned. He finds it hard to talk about emotions, hard to say... If somebody doesn't know it... He'll say sorry if you call him on it, but he walks straight into it."

It is a curious new reality: the ageing patriarch subject to the modern language of behaviour and relationships. The Murdoch children's wherewithal to critique their father comes not just from the psychological predicament they have shared - in this Elisabeth sounds like any well-analysed fortysomething - but also from the fact that they share his professional world. Talking about their father is shop talk. Indeed, they've often conspired together in the workplace - they know his moves. When Elisabeth first came to London and was given a job at BSkyB under Sam Chisholm, Murdoch had him believe she was an underling, but then he was on the phone with her constantly and she became his back channel. He promoted his inexperienced offspring into his formidable tool. His children know better than anybody how he works.

This is one of the odder aspects of the Murdoch dynasty - its relatively clear awareness of itself, and its analytic regard for the patriarch. There's a sense that the children are intent on not being played the way he's playing everyone else.

The addition of Freud added a further ironic twist to this analysis. After the birth of Matthew and Elisabeth's first child, Charlotte, it was Anna Murdoch who marvelled in an interview she gave in 2001 in Australia: "I thought, what on earth is this baby going to be like, with the blood of Rupert Murdoch and Sigmund Freud running about its veins?" Freud has added another level, not just of modern personal astuteness but of media consciousness. At times, he almost makes Murdoch seem like an innocent.

Murdoch was at first rather horrified by this man of deep connectedness, superb analytic abilities and possibly dynastic ambitions of his own. But he has come to quite like his son-in-law, something in which the son-in-law seems to take enormous pride. In the summer of 2007, when the family is sailing around Sicily, a photo is taken of the pair arm in arm, hanging off the top of the boat. Freud gets a framed copy as a keepsake.

Elisabeth and Matthew, of course, started a business together. It's an example, finally, of true media synergy: her name and his connections jump-started a scrappy television production company into which she threw her all and out of which she created a significant business. She has built a media company apart from her father's media company. This confuses him as much as it impresses him. He frequently imagines her moving back to New York or to Los Angeles, but Elisabeth is keeping herself at bay, which of course makes her all the more alluring.

James

James may be the kid his father understands least of all. This may be calculated, a certain cat-and-mouse game with the old man. You can dodge him by talking over his head.

James's record label, Rawkus, which he dropped out of Harvard to set up in 1995, was either a conscious or instinctive move into the one area of media in which his father has no interest or experience. Music hadn't ever been among the Murdoch media businesses. But suddenly he had a son full of A&R talk. A semi-hipster son with his hip-hop acts and bleached blond hair, which would be traded in (as soon as Pop bought the record label) for sharp suits and black, thick-rimmed glasses when he grabbed the internet business at News Corp during the dotcom boom. He set himself up, in his mid-20s, as technologist and futurist and digital leader. His father had no idea what he was talking about, but was pleased someone was doing the talking. And then came satellites. James took over the Asian satellite operation in 2000, months after he was married. Satellites were a business in which his father had been successful but, in essence, didn't know beans about. Once more, James put himself out of harm's way in his canny appreciation of his father's MO: dominate what he understands, find someone to trust when he doesn't. His brother, running newspapers, was bound to be second-guessed by his father; James had a much wider berth. On virtually any issue involving technology, from the mid-90s on, Murdoch would seek his son's counsel, regardless of his having no established technological expertise. Like so many people in the early internet boom, James could talk the talk. His father has, curiously, come to believe that James is not just so much smarter about all this stuff than he is, but better educated, too - which is, Oxford graduate to Harvard dropout, not exactly true.

Certainty comes naturally to James. He is the most articulate member of the family - really the only articulate Murdoch. He's all about constant, declarative conversation (though he is the only one of his siblings to put direct quotes from our interview off the record). It's all challenge and menace. He wants to joust, clash, correct, instruct, prevail. No niceties. When I meet him in London at the BSkyB offices, he discusses the advantages of his father's menacing reputation with a pleased glint in his eye. "A little menace isn't a bad thing." But his father's menace - cowboy- or outlaw-style - has mutated in James into a sort of programmatic, techno-manager, automaton-like cultishness. And from his mouth comes paragraph after paragraph of super-abstracted business-speak.

His sister, Prue, refers - half-affectionately, half-mockingly - to his OCD. The first to have children, she noticed James' horror one day as they ate dinner on his yacht and her youngest, Clementine, then five, ate her spaghetti with her hands. "Because James is almost obsessive-compulsive, he started having contortions," Prue says. "I had hoped he would learn the lesson about children when he had his own. But no, James's children are perfect. Elisabeth's children are perfect. Lachlan's children are perfect. And I have got the ragamuffins."

James's arrival at BSkyB in 2003 required a special brazenness. This was, after all, a major independent public company and here he was, the inexperienced, barely adult son of the chairman of the controlling shareholders, being handed the top job. True, his arrival was carefully orchestrated by his father (there was Murdoch's deal with Conrad Black that his papers would go easy on Black's legal problems if Black's Telegraph went easy on James' appointment), as well as Murdoch calling in favours from investors in London's financial community. But what finally carried the day was James's own relentlessness. He stared everybody down. As British investors were wiping 19% off BSkyB stock in one day in 2004, James was adamantly telling them he would make the outrageous target of eight million subscribers by 2006. By the time his brother announced his resignation in July 2005, it was clear James would exceed all the company's goals - and suddenly the non-Murdoch British press seemed happy to call him the deserved heir apparent.

And then he really made his bones, facing down arch competitor Richard Branson when he attempted to merge his cable company Virgin Media with ITV. In 2006, as Virgin Media and ITV were negotiating their merger, James swooped in, dead of night, and bought 17.9% of ITV, seriously lousing up the Virgin deal.

It was so Murdochian: the suddenness, the secrecy, the game-changing, the lack of manners, the audacity. Actually, it was audacious, in part, because it was such a crummy deal. News Corp would never be allowed to buy the whole company (it probably wouldn't want it, anyway), it paid way above market value and would probably be forced at some point to sell its position (it has). If News Corp loses its appeal against the ruling and has to sell its stake, losses could exceed a billion dollars. On the other hand, this bad deal bought BSkyB probably three years to get its broadband play in place without a serious competitor - and what matters is that the Murdoch kid did something his old man might have done.

Throughout the deal to buy Dow Jones, which faces fierce opposition from the American establishment, he is his father's constant confidant. In James's telling, everybody else - in and outside News Corp - is resistant. It's he and Rupert toughing it out.

His father, perhaps most of all, is wowed by the boy's pure aggression, by his fight, by his fearsomeness. Which is why the old man figures that, as he chases the Wall Street Journal, it's time to move James up. Having proved his Murdochness, in December 2007 James is named head of News Corp in Europe and Asia, in addition to BSkyB. For now at least, he seems destined to take over the "empire" - and the Murdoch children really do call it that. ·

• This is an edited extract from The Man Who Owns The News, by Michael Wolff, published by The Bodley Head next week (£20)